with commentary by Derren Brown
Most people who try to read The Meditations give up. Not because it is too difficult (it is not, in the way that Kant or Hegel is difficult) but because it doesn’t behave like a book. There is no argument building toward a conclusion. No narrative. No chapter structure that rewards linear reading. Marcus Aurelius circles the same ideas repeatedly, varies the phrasing, and never resolves into a tidy philosophical position.
Derren Brown has read The Meditations more times than he can count. His copy is held together with tape and covered in marginalia. His Rebind commentary on the book begins with a warning and ends with a recommendation, and between them is the most practical guide to first-time reading that any Rebind commentator has offered about their book.
His method compresses to five instructions: know you are reading a private notebook, not a treatise; skip Book One on the first pass and start with Book Two or Four; carry in two frameworks, the Stoic dichotomy of control and Pierre Hadot’s three disciplines; keep a companion book alongside; and plan to return, because The Meditations only opens on rereading.
Understand What Kind of Book It Is
The single most important thing to know before opening The Meditations is that Marcus Aurelius never intended it as a book. “It’s not like this because Marcus is a bad writer,” Brown says in his Rebind commentary. “He is writing for himself, which means he’s often overstating things because that’s the language he needs to remind himself of what’s important at that time.”
The repetition, which first-time readers often find tedious, is structural. Marcus is drilling himself in ideas he already understands. He knows the value of colorful language and repetition to make ideas stick; he was trained by the best rhetoricians in the empire. What might seem like boring repetition has another purpose: it is the practice of embedding the ideas deeply enough that they are available under pressure. Think of it as a private training regime rather than a published work. If our own diaries were read by someone else, Brown notes, they’d be interminable. The Meditations is interminable in places too. That is not a reason to stop.
Don’t Start with Book One
“Book One, I think, is a really weak way into the book,” Brown says. “It’s a little bit off-putting, really. I would challenge anyone not to just start skipping through it, and it gives you a very bad sense of what’s to follow.”
Book One is twenty-three thank-yous: a catalogue of what Marcus owes his grandfather, mother, father, tutors, and adoptive father. It was probably not written as part of the greater work at all but as a separate Stoic exercise: paying careful attention to the virtuous qualities in people he had known, and naming his gratitude precisely. It is its own thing, and a strange entry point.
Brown recommends starting with Book Two or Four, where Marcus’s characteristic style first becomes fully apparent, and where the aphorisms he keeps returning to are densest. Once you have a feel for the rhythm of the book, going back to Book One becomes more interesting: you start to notice the subtle digs and criticisms embedded in the praise, and the characters become more colorful.
Install Two Pieces of Equipment First
Before reading, Brown recommends equipping yourself with two frameworks that will make the rest of the book readable.
The first is a clear definition of Stoicism: a practical philosophy that holds that the only things truly within our control are our thoughts and our actions, and that everything else (reputation, money, health, outcomes) should be treated with what the Stoics called “indifference.” Not apathy, but a refusal to let externals determine your inner state. The key is the distinction between what is within our control and what isn’t, and the discipline of directing all effort toward the former.
The second is the framework developed by the French philosopher Pierre Hadot, who read The Meditations as organized around three disciplines: desire (what we should want), action (how we should live with others), and judgment (how we form our assessments of events). “These are three big themes, and it helps to have them in our mind,” Brown says. “How we desire, how we should act, and then the judgments we should form about the world so that it doesn’t disturb us too much and doesn’t infect our soul.” With these in hand, the book’s apparent repetitions resolve into variations on a structure.
Read Secondary Material Alongside It
Brown’s most practical recommendation is to read The Meditations in parallel with introductory material on Marcus’s life and the Stoic tradition. “If you go away, particularly if you read a bit of secondary literature around it and things that open up other ideas, then going back to it is more interesting,” he says, “because you understand who some of the people are he’s referring to.”
Some useful companions: Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life and The Inner Citadel (the latter specifically on Marcus); Donald Robertson’s How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which combines biography with Stoic practice; and Anthony Birley’s scholarly biography Marcus Aurelius: A Biography for the historical context.
Expect to Return to It
The single piece of advice Brown most consistently offers about The Meditations is to return to it. “The first time I read it, I thought I can’t imagine ever reading this again,” he says. “But actually… every time I read it, I am discovering something new.”
That is a feature of the text, not a peculiarity of Brown’s reading. The Meditations is not a book you read to find out what it says. It is a book you return to when you need what it says. Different entries will land differently depending on what you are going through. The aphorisms Marcus kept returning to, about fame, about death, about difficult people, about the present moment, have the quality of tools. They sit inert until you have a use for them, and then they become indispensable.